The role of the scribe in the composition of written correspondence in Israel and Judah

[Extract] Because the Hebrew Bible is a composite work with a rich and complex transmission history, biblical scholars have a long-standing fascination with the scribal institutions from which it emerged.1 As observed by Karel van der Toorn:

If we are to understand the making of the Hebrew Bible, we must familiarize ourselves with the scribal culture that produced it. That culture was the culture of the literate elite. The scribes who manufactured the Bible were professional writers affiliated with the temple of Jerusalem. They practiced their craft in a time in which there was neither a trade in books nor a reading public of any substance. Scribes wrote for scribes.2

This focus on scribal culture in the context of literary text production has yielded valuable insights into the history of the biblical text, but it has also had an unintended flattening effect, often reflecting an a priori assumption that trained scribes were primarily to be found in the civil and cultic bureaucracies attached to major royal or religious centres. Yet scribal activity in ancient Israel was not limited to the production of biblical literature, and documentary evidence suggests that Hebrew scribes could be encountered in a wide array of situations and performed a range of duties.